![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
According to globalisation theories, the importance of international organisations such as UNESCO and EU regarding processes of policy-making is increasing and it is no longer the nation state alone that is regulating policy. Focusing on equity and social justice as central topics of the global discourse, the article raises the question of how these concepts are negotiated within the context of adult education. It presents empirical findings from a comparison of national reports by UNESCO member states and allows conclusions concerning connections between the international and the national level. As regards the methodological approach, the lexicometric analysis is introduced as an addition to the scope of methods currently applied in adult education policy research. The results of the study show that there are different patterns of understandings referring to equity and social justice when contrasting states that are solely UNESCO members with states that have a double-membership in UNESCO and EU: when having an additional EU membership, states refer to typical topics of the EU agenda such as employability, even if they are addressed as UNESCO members. Thereby, equity and social justice function as examples to show how agenda-setting by international organisations, especially by the EU, influences the national discourse.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Other studies for example focus on the conceptualisation of active citizenship in policy documents from Durkheim’s theoretical perspective (Field and Schemmann Citation2017) and indicate a shift to an economic perspective on lifelong learning that is framed as an individual task (Biesta Citation2006) as well as a shift from adult education to lifelong learning (Milana Citation2012). Furthermore, there are studies referring to Foucault’s perspective on gouvernementality and discourse to explain policy processes on the international level (e.g. Fejes Citation2006, Citation2008).
2 Often these two labels are referred to as synonymous. When they are differentiated, authors draw to categories such as the kind of approach (inductive vs. deductive) or to connected methodological implications and goals of the analysis (Scholz and Mattissek Citation2014). Since the label of lexicometric analysis is often used in the context of discourse analysis (ibid., p. 90), it is applied in the present study.
3 Collocations refer to ‘a relationship of habitual cooccourence between words’(Stubbs Citation1995, p. 1). The analysis of collocations enables to quantitatively illustrate how often words appear together in a specific range.
4 An analysis of concordance enables to approach the context of a word in a qualitative way: sentences with a specific word in it are being listed giving an overview of every location in the corpus the word appears in.
5 Only content words were regarded, function words were excluded from the analysis. Words were subsumed to lemmata: a lemma is defined as ‘a dictionary head-word, which is realized by various word forms’(Stubbs Citation1995, p. 2). For example, the lemma ‘equity’ refers to several forms of the word, such as ‘equitable’.
6 To review the findings and keeping in mind that the EU and non-EU states are not a homogenous group, additional tests were carried out. For example, the two groups (EU and non-EU) were split in two random subgroups. For these subgroups, the analysis was carried out again and the findings were compared to the findings of the main analysis. This step of analysis showed that splitting the EU- and non-EU corpus in random subgroups does not produce results that differ remarkably from the results of the main analysis so that a statistical robustness is indicated.
7 The missing ranks in the table indicate to words not being meaningful for the research question (e.g. the word issues).